The best movies new to streaming in November 2023, with great movies to watch on Netflix, Max, and more. Watch Belly, Drag Me to Hell, and The Last Duel this month.
Spooky season has come and gone, but good movies are perennial. To paraphrase Gorillaz: November has come, and a whole slew of new movies to stream on Netflix, Hulu, Max, and more have come with it.
This month, we’ve got the Sam Raimi horror thriller Drag Me to Hell and a Michael Bay action-thriller starring John Krasinski on Netflix. Ridley Scott’s medieval action drama The Last Duel starring Matt Damon and Adam Driver comes to Hulu, while Max adds a classic Ernst Lubitsch-directed rom-com starring James Stewart. If that wasn’t enough, our editor’s pick this month is Belly, Hype Williams’ divisive yet transcendent crime drama starring Nas and the late DMX.
Let’s dive in and see what this month has in store!Editor’s pickBelly
Genre: Crime drama
Director: Hype Williams
Cast: Nas, DMX, Taral Hicks
Hype Williams is one of the most prolific music video directors of all time. With a career spanning as far back as the early ’90s, the graffiti artist turned filmmaker has worked with some of the most genre-defining acts in hip-hop, from A Tribe Called Quest to Outkast, carving out the prevailing visual language of rap videos through his characteristic blend of canted wide-angle shots, stark saturated lighting, and slow-motion transitions. Belly, his feature debut (and only film as of this writing), is a synthesis of all these elements, resulting in a movie that taps directly into the zeitgeist of hip-hop’s mainstream ascendance.
Nas and DMX co-star as Sincere and Tommy “Bundy” Brown, two young street criminals who make their living sticking up rivals and dealing drugs in a hallucinatory version of New York. As Bundy climbs way up through the criminal underworld, dodging police raids and cutting deals in Jamaica, Sincere begins to have a change of heart, choosing instead to pursue another way of life. Escaping the cycle of violence and iniquity is easier said than done, however, as both men find themselves faced with the consequences of their past in the pursuit of a better future.
The story, co-written by Williams and Nas, is far from the strongest element of the film. Instead, Belly’s strengths are found in its visuals, which play out like a hallucinatory montage of music video vignettes sans music, with dark, shadowy silhouettes looming across spacious exteriors and ethereal interiors. The movie was a critical and commercial bomb when it premiered in theaters, but in the decades since has grown into a cult favorite among audiences for its audacious aesthetic and a star-making performance from DMX, who at the time was mere weeks away from releasing the second of his first two Billboard 200-topping albums. Belly is a genuinely fascinating time capsule of late-’90s experimental filmmaking that’s well worth experiencing.
